Maguire, Emma (2021) Facebook Society: Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves by Roberto Simanowski (review). Biography, 44 (4). pp. 672-676.

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Abstract

[Extract] Facebook Society is a passionate disavowal of contemporary digital sociality. In it, Roberto Simanowski mourns the loss of contemplative thinking, narrative skills, and reflection that the proliferation of social media has heralded. Bringing together philosophers, poets, and digital humanities scholars, Simanowski critiques the state of the contemporary self, and explores how it has been damaged by social media corporations. Although this might sound like a complaint with which readers are already familiar and perhaps tempted to dismiss, Simanowski's arguments are deeply sophisticated and thoroughly researched. Facebook Society adds some much-needed complexity to characterizations of social media as a degrading force, and Simanowski serves as an engaging intellectual antagonist to those of us who hold differing viewpoints. Ultimately, Simanowski goes beyond lamenting the changes wrought by networked technologies and asks what it means to be human in the digital age.

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